[Madhav Gadgil at Kasaragod. Image:Wikimedia Foundation]
The death of Madhav Gadgil marks more than the passing of a celebrated environmental scientist. It marks the loss of a way of thinking that Indian public life has quietly abandoned and now badly needs back.
Gadgil had the credentials to live comfortably inside abstraction. A PhD from Harvard in 1969. Complete command over mathematical ecology, models, and scientific method. A career that shaped Indian environmentalism, from founding the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science to influencing the Biological Diversity Act and chairing the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel. Yet none of this explains why his death, at 83 in Pune on January 7, 2026, feels heavier than most.
The clue lies elsewhere. In a recent conversation about Gadgil’s passing, Satish Pradhan, who has worked across conservation institutions, boardrooms, and public causes including the Bombay Natural History Society, put it plainly. Gadgil refused clean answers to messy problems. Conservation, he believed, could not be practised as if humans were an external irritant to be edited out of the model. People lived inside ecosystems. They farmed, grazed, fished, built, and survived there. Any science that ignored this reality might look elegant but would fail where it mattered most.
From Pune to the Field
That sensibility was formed early. As a teenager in Pune, Gadgil noticed something odd about the Green Bee-eaters perched on electric wires near his home. During certain months, their long pin-like tail feathers seemed to vanish. Unable to find an explanation in his bird books, he wrote, at his father Dhananjay Gadgil’s suggestion, to Salim Ali. Ali replied in his careful handwriting. It was simply the annual moult. The feathers would grow back in a few weeks.
The Baya Weaver entered Gadgil’s life later. Ali was in Pune studying their breeding biology near the Parvati Hills, and the young Gadgil made an appointment to meet him. Watching Ali work in the field, sharp, witty, and deeply attentive, settled the matter. Gadgil would become a field biologist.
That early attentiveness to lived ecology never left him.
It surfaced forcefully at Bharatpur. While Ali argued for removing buffaloes to protect birdlife, Gadgil observed something different. After grazing was banned, grass grew so thick that water birds could no longer land or feed. He often referred to this as the irony of Bharatpur. Conservation meant to protect birds had damaged their habitat. For Gadgil, it was proof that traditional human activity, far from being a contaminant, was often essential to ecological balance.
Sacred Groves and Community Wisdom
This was not an isolated view. One of Gadgil’s earliest and most influential contributions was his work on Sacred Groves, or devrai. He showed that these were not merely religious sites but sophisticated, community-managed biodiversity systems. In many cases, they performed better than state-run forest departments. Long before community-led conservation became fashionable, Gadgil had already demonstrated its logic.
What mattered as much as his arguments was how he handled disagreement. Despite sharp differences with figures and institutions he admired, Gadgil did not walk away. He remained a life member of BNHS. He continued to write, argue, and engage. Decades later, he accepted the Salim Ali National Award for Nature Conservation from the same institution. Disagreement, for him, was not disloyalty. It was part of institutional adulthood.
The Western Ghats Test
That instinct, to stay engaged rather than exit, defined his later public life.
It was tested most severely with the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel. As chair, Gadgil submitted a report recommending that the entire Western Ghats be treated as an ecologically sensitive region, with strict limits on mining, dams, and polluting industries, and decision-making devolved to local communities. The response followed a familiar script. States objected. The Centre hesitated. A second committee was formed. The recommendations were diluted.
Gadgil did not disown the process. He continued to defend the report on scientific grounds. “To tackle climate change and its impact,” he told The Indian Express, “we will have to address activities such as rock quarries and traffic congestion. But that will not be easy because quarries and selling vehicles are huge sources of money. Hopefully, in the future, people at the ground level and marginalised communities will organise and make their voices heard to change the situation.”
The episode revealed a recurring institutional reflex. Governments wanted expert advice but showed limited tolerance for conclusions that disrupted administrative convenience or economic priorities.
Gadgil’s unease with bureaucracy ran deeper. He was sceptical of environmental governance reduced to clearance files and compliance checklists. Such systems, he argued, mistook procedure for protection and treated communities as obstacles rather than participants. Conservation could not succeed through paperwork alone.
Rigour Without Distance
Physically, too, he remained rooted in the field. He often credited his stamina to growing up near Pune’s Vetal Tekdi and, even in his late seventies, was known to outpace younger researchers during field visits, usually in simple rubber chappals or sturdy walking shoes.
He described himself as a scientist empathetic to people. Empathy, in his work, was not softness. It was discipline. The discipline to hold mathematical rigour and social justice together without collapsing into slogans, bans, or binaries. Anthropogenic pressure, he insisted, was not a flaw in ecological thinking. It was part of ecological reality.
Gadgil received the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan, and international honours. Tributes now call him the father of Indian ecology and a prophet of the Western Ghats. Yet the most consequential part of his legacy lies elsewhere, in the example he set.
With Madhav Gadgil’s passing, something quieter has gone missing. Not just a scientist, but a civilisational capability. The ability to argue without dehumanising, to protect without erasing, and to remain engaged without surrendering judgment.
The question he leaves behind is not whether he was right. It is whether institutions, movements, and citizens still know how to do the work he treated as the minimum requirement.
